S2 Ep3: Can you Separate the Art From the Artist? PART ONE

As you touched upon Eddie, there's now just so much negative information out there about public figures.

It's become a bit of a minefield to say the least.

Someone I've been thinking about quite a lot recently is John Lennon, who's sort of film adjacent, and he's one of my absolute heroes, as an artist anyway.

But the more I've found out about him over the years, the more I've come to realise that he wasn't always a good person.

In fact, some of his behaviour was downright inexcusable, just horrendous.

So what are we supposed to do with that conflict of conscience?

I think that you have to separate the art from the artist.

And I think that you have to, so for example, let's say that you don't like John Lennon.

So would we say that we can't, don't listen to the Beatles then because John Lennon is one of the voices and you can hear his voice in them.

And it's like, so therefore you wouldn't listen to Paul McCartney singing Yesterday because he recorded it with the Beatles, but then what impact did John Lennon have on that song? So you get into this business of, wait a minute, filmmaking is a collaborative business.

So there's a whole bunch of people involved.

So you don't like Kevin Spacey.

Okay.

So do we not watch Seven anymore? Kevin Spacey's in that for about 10 minutes.

Do we not watch Glengarry Glen Ross, an amazing ensemble film with a fantastic message? Do we not watch that? Because Spacey's one of the people involved, even if he's like fifth building it.

So I've written about both of these films recently and written about them in a positive way because I believe that That is a piece of art.

It is separate from the morality of what the people involved in it.

So, you know, I think these things are tricky and you have to pick your way carefully through them.

But I think it's not really kind of on to rubbish an entire... body of work just because of one person's involvement, particularly from something they did after the creation of that particular body of work.

So I get that, you know, it's problematic, for example, every movie that starts a Harvey Weinstein production that raises a question, you know, that that immediately kind of like We now know a bit more about Weinstein's methods.

We know about people's careers that were ruined because they didn't want to sleep with this kind of horrible man.

And so, you know, that is a distasteful thing.

But does that mean that all the great work that people did on Harvey Weinstein's film should be abandoned because he was a horror? So I think in general, I try and actually be...

It sounds kind of self-aggrandizing to try and be the bigger man, but to try and look at the overall thing, the object that is put in front of you and separate that from other things that you may have heard about them, which may be products of their time.

Alfred Hitchcock, we hear now, was not a very nice person to the actors that he dealt with in set.